There have been many individual efforts to provide information to public, and receive information from the public, but these have mostly been small-scale, isolated, and not integrated into a consolidated, unified effort. In addition, there has been little effort to consider the public as an integral element in the information infrastructure. Only recently, has there been some simple efforts to employ predictive analytics into the process and to expand the communications means to include the social media networking. Most of today's systems of information acquisition, distribution, and display are focused on marketing and sales of commodities, whereas the High value information Alert and Reporting System (HARS) first priority is focused on objectives related to law enforcement, and the identification and apprehension of wanted criminals, terrorists, and suspicious activities.
In those information acquisition and distribution efforts related to law enforcement, academia has expended considerable thought, paper and dollars to produce a plethora of possibilities on how information should be collected and shared among various law enforcement organizations, but comparatively little effort has been placed on the benefit of harnessing the power of the public to become an integral part of the information transfer process.
The public is large body of people which constitutes all aspects of our society. There is a tremendous amount of information that can directly benefit the public. In addition, the power of the people can be a powerful tool to help make communities a safer place to live. By including the public in the dissemination and collection of information, the “public eyes” can help locate criminals and/or missing persons. Every day, public safety officials receive tips from the public in many different ways and with varying degrees of accuracy. In fact, it is well-established that the public has been very successful in helping law enforcement by providing timely information on highly publicized cases to which the public has been solicited for information.
However, few concerted efforts have been made to harness the public eyes in assisting law enforcement and other government agencies with the day to day happenings within our communities. Some current examples include: electronic message boards along the highways, electronic billboards in cities, and television programs like America's Most Wanted. These efforts have been successful to some degree, however each approach is limited in scope, and tends to be a broadcast of information, in a shotgun approach, which results in the majority of viewers not being in a position or location to help.
To this end, the need exists for a system and method to allow high value information to be disseminated to and received from the public, particularly when the distribution of the information is precisely targeted to locations where the public is in the best position to achieve positive results.
There are a wide variety of existing techniques which have been offered to collect information from various sources and to provide information to the public. However, each is limited in scope. In some cases the communications is only to dedicated terminals or designated/enrolled persons. In most cases, the focus is extremely limited and only addresses a small, discrete, physical area. Newer technologies such as the “Cloud”, predictive analytics, smart databases and social media/networking are only just beginning to be considered, whereas HARS incorporates these technologies and they are integral to its functional operation. Extremely few of the current art integrates the public into the design and creates a linkage into current Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and facilities such as Fusion Centers.
HARS is scalable and is an open system, which makes it extremely versatile. Implementation can range from a stand-alone, single facility implementation to an international implementation. HARS is a system, which integrates many disparate systems and efforts into a homogeneous operation. Another aspect of HARS is that it includes the interfaces to incorporate other, Non-HARS systems and networks into HARS to create an “expanded” network to achieve increased efficiencies and effectiveness through increased scale of equipment and operations.